


Apparently It's A Hard Habit To Break

by MyCupOfTea



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, mostly because of my ignorance of comic book canon, questionable adherence to canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 10:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/649664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyCupOfTea/pseuds/MyCupOfTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time passes for everyone, but it seems to be a particular burden for Steve Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apparently It's A Hard Habit To Break

This is twice now. 

Steve Rogers is a person of habit. Get up at the same time every day, go to bed at the same time every night. But this is one habit he wishes he hadn’t developed. 

Twice he’s outlived everybody he cares about. 

The first time he was trapped in ice and woke up one day and they were gone. It was the opposite of waking up from a nightmare and finding out it was all fake. He fell from a livable existence into hell. 

But he recovered. He met new people, new faces, new reasons to get out of bed in the morning. New reasons to fight. 

And then he watched them die, one by one. 

He knew his life span would be increased by the serum, but he figured the seventy years in ice had eaten away at them enough.

Apparently not. 

It surprises them all when Banner was the first to go. A mere ten years after the founding of the Avengers, he had a heart attack. 

The significance of the first was not lost on any of them. As they walk away from the funeral, Steve couldn’t miss what Tony quietly says to Pepper as they walk together in front of him. 

“You know, I honestly thought I’d be the first.” 

He also doesn’t miss how their grip tightens on one another. 

Tony isn’t the second, either, to leave them. Although he doesn’t die, Thor’s forced stay on Asgard leaves a profound hole in their team. He leaves one day and never returns. They have no proof, but there is a mutual, unspoken consensus that it is not within Thor’s power to return. It is unlike him to leave his friends. 

Twenty years have gone by since the first time the Avengers were assembled. By then it’s a countdown and they’re all wondering with a sick sense of curiosity who is going to be next. 

Turns out it’s Tony. Twenty one years in the suit, and one day he gets a blow to the chest that even all that ridiculously over-strengthened metal can’t handle. It doesn’t matter that the arc reactor was destroyed; decades old shrapnel is the least of your worries when your heart has a rib stuck through it. 

Steve is the one to tell Pepper, but he knows by her expression when he walks in to the room alone that she already knows. 

Clint and Natasha leave together. They’re away on an unrelated mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. that goes wrong. There’s not enough left of them to bury. 

And then there’s just Steve. Just him and a world he still doesn’t fit into, 

He hasn’t changed much over the years, unlike his friends. He watched them go grey, the lines etch a little bit deeper in their faces, and he looks in the mirror and sees the same face he sees every morning. Maybe a little bit more somber, a little bit more weary, but still his. 

And he sees no change on the horizon. There is no end, not unless one of these solo missions S.H.I.E.LD. sends him on nowadays goes horribly wrong, which doesn’t seem likely. The world is calming down, relaxing around more apathetic leaders rather than the ones full of fire and readiness that spurred them on to great and horrible heights. 

And he misses them. More than he ever thought he could. They were more than merely fellow soldiers. They were the only people who could truly understand his position. 

And now they couldn’t even do that, if they were here. All of them lived within the confines of a normal life span, if a little shorter. 

Steve doesn’t think of himself as old until the day Fury dies. That was how he really knew that he was all alone. He half believed Fury would live forever. But no. He was all alone. 

And always will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted to this-is-my-cup-of-tea.tumblr.com.


End file.
